Terrible BT broadband speed problems since November

Hi there

Absolutely fed up with broadband dropuot and speed issues..Live in a village a couple miles from the Sharnbrook Bedfordshire exchange...uptil November 2010 therewas a stable-ish line running about 1.5 megs, since then the loss of speed issues has been excasperating to say the least..Hours and hours on the phone to India, they work from a script which is infuriatingly repetitous, I explain everytime that I run on an ethernet connection going straight into an Openworld (master) connection on the wall - with no extensions. I am not an expert on adsl issues - I just want the internet to work at a reasonable speed. But it seems BT have been less than honest when it comes to supplying Rural Communities. I will post my speed & home hub details below.....Yes suprise! I have noise on the line! In my village the power & telecom wires are supplied via the same telegraph poles, when farmer blogs up the road turns on his milking machines or whatever, guess what! the power surge trips my (& perhaps others too!) Hub! The resulting moronic adaptive profiling software, knocks down the profile, thus dropping my speed! Then it takes a phonecall to india & perhaps more than a week before any improvement, its a nightmare! Why have BT rolled out this adaptive system to place's that are vunerable to such power surges?The old sytem actually worked better & BT could argue that they did a good job supplying the Rural Communities

Now, we felt very let down by this...

Is there anything at all that can be done about this? the most we get if lucky is maybe a week running at the glorious speed of 1 meg before the speed drops like a stone & I have to go thru the endless repetitous motions of phoning india to 'up my profile' again?

Any help would be appreciated, also would moving to Orange or another supplier that uses a different adsl sytem work for us, does anybody know?>

Re: Terrible BT broadband speed problems since November

moving to another provider assuming you can find one will use the same equipment and the same phone line as it will just be BT but with someone elses name on it. There are no LLu providers on your exchange.

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Re: Terrible BT broadband speed problems since November

Thanks for your reply but that is not the answer i was hoping for!

a. What is a 'llu' provider?

b. Some of our neighbours are on Orange & get a reasonably stable abeit on the 1 - 2 meg speed

C. An engineer told one of our neighbours that whilst it is true that Orange utilises the same cabling as BT, the line goes into seperate circuitry and that the BT curcuits are often running at max capacity. Is this true?

D. Orange use a diferent adsl syncing system that would be more suitable for our rural neighbourhood, could that be true?

I didnt mention on my original message that I also had half a dozen engineer visits

Is there any hope our broadband situation will improve in the near future, or should we actually consider moving from our home to a more 'broadband friendly' location?

(No sign of Infinity round here in near future)

Oh & why dont BT sort out an easy user 'profile' bumper. So we dont have to keep ringing or emailing BT to do it when it goes wrong..which in our case is every other week!

Many thanks Oh & could you please 'bump up' my profile while your at it....current speed 185kbps and falling!

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Re: Terrible BT broadband speed problems since November

b. Some of our neighbours are on Orange & get a reasonably stable abeit on the 1 - 2 meg speed

C. An engineer told one of our neighbours that whilst it is true that Orange utilises the same cabling as BT, the line goes into seperate circuitry and that the BT curcuits are often running at max capacity. Is this true?

D. Orange use a diferent adsl syncing system that would be more suitable for our rural neighbourhood, could that be true?

I didnt mention on my original message that I also had half a dozen engineer visits

Is there any hope our broadband situation will improve in the near future, or should we actually consider moving from our home to a more 'broadband friendly' location?

(No sign of Infinity round here in near future)

Oh & why dont BT sort out an easy user 'profile' bumper. So we dont have to keep ringing or emailing BT to do it when it goes wrong..which in our case is every other week!

Many thanks Oh & could you please 'bump up' my profile while your at it....current speed 185kbps and falling!

a) An 'LLU' (Local Loop Unbundling) provider is an ISP who installs their own equipment in an exchange so their customers do not have to use BTs equipment. They typically offer Up To 20Mb on all exchanges which they have unbundled.

b) Your neighbours will be on a different pair than you are, so they might be on shorter cable back to the exchange.

c) This would be true if Orange have unbundled your exchange (Which they haven't) so what the engineer said is true... but not for your exchange. Orange rent capacity from BT and therefore use BT's equipment to supply their services on exchanges which they have not unbundled.

d) Orange's LLU equipment is compatible with ADSL2+ (ITU G.992.5), ADSL2 (ITU G.992.3/4) and ADSL1 (ITU G.992.1 - G.DMT). The ADSL2+ modulation is great with shorter lines as it can supply Up to 24Mb but on your line, it would probably perform slower judging by your 'Loss of Framing' and 'Loss of Signal' counts.

Now, something which may help to solve your problem (a bit).

Could you try and do a quiet line test by calling 17070 and selecting Option 2. You shouldn't be able to hear anything but if you do, call 151 and report a voice fault but do NOT mention anything to do with broadband 🙂

I hope this helps.

___________________________________

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Re: Terrible BT broadband speed problems since November

Unfortunately unless your line has a stable connection your profile will constantly vary the exchange equipment needs to see a constant sync speed to maintain a constant a constant ip profile and as imjolly has already said Orange are using the same line and exchange equipment as BT and any other ISP operating from your exchange

Re: Terrible BT broadband speed problems since November

Could you try and do a quiet line test by calling 17070 and selecting Option 2. You shouldn't be able to hear anything but if you do, call 151 and report a voice fault but do NOT mention anything to do with broadband

I hope this helps.

Thanks for your help! Ok, I phoned the quiet line test with a chorded phone going straight in the test socket & I am not exactly sure what I am supposed NOT to hear but there was noise down there! Firstly there was a continuous hum- not unlike an earth hum with some very slight modulation. I would say it was 15-20db below the level of the voice. Secondly there were intermitent flurries of white noise - but that may be from the old chorded phone I was using.

Anyway I did as you suggested, phoned up and rep[orted a line fault, the guy (Chris) said he would send an email & test the line. On doing this he couldnt find a problem from his end but suggested I follow the troubleshooting guide on the bt help site. Much of this I had done before apart from not using a chorded phone My usual landline phone is a BT Studio 1500, I will leave it turned off for the time being. I did the tests, including shutting off all other electrical appliances in the vincinity, but there was no difference in the noise levels. I turned the hub off at the wall also (I suppose thats another 3 day wait now!) no level difference! The only thing I havnt been able to do is to plug an alternative chorded phone into the socket (I havnt got one!) or take my chorded phone and try it in someone elses socket!

Past visits from engineers have turned up noise on their test equipment before and supposedly rectified it, but alas not for long! The BT phone fault man Chris asked me if I would need an engineer visit - bearing in mind he couldnt find anything wrong at his end.

Re: Terrible BT broadband speed problems since November

Hey guys, I had an engineer visit on tuesday (the sixth or seventh in the last 6 months) He identified a faulty crimp in the box in the road. He replaced it, showed me some readings (mfraid I didnt really know what i was looking at!) but he said the noise levels were much better. He said i would have to wait a few days. Its now friday, that was 3 & a half days ago....Guess what?THE SPEED HAS GONE DOWN FURTHER!here is the hub details for adsl

I will post the BT speedtest if i can get it too load up, altho i don't hold up much hope for that (Like the way most of the web fails to work at these speeds!)

Please Please, what can I do, to get up to speed anybody?

I have had 6 or 7 engineer visits, nearly 100 phone calls to India, six months of dreadfully slow internet. I mean come on BT, this must be costing you a fortune as well as me...Let me ask again...CAN YOU PLEASE DELIVER ME BROADBAND?I would jump at the chance to change to another supplier if it would work, but as john46 mentioned, i need BT to stabilize my line before anyone can provide me stable Broadband.

Re: Terrible BT broadband speed problems since November

well the engineer has succeeded in dropping your attenuation from 63 to 57 by fixing the fault which is good. Have you tried the quiet line test again after the engineer visit just your noise margin is still high at 15.9 as normal about 6

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Re: Terrible BT broadband speed problems since November

Your peak kbps has improved to 720, which is what I was getting even though stated more. Are you plugged into the main test socket, behind the faceplate of the main socket? If the test socket has anything bar an openreach symbol you may need an iplate £8. I always keep by broacband I have a post at the top but have roughly explained what I have done to improve mine. Get yourself a spiral high speed RJ11 line from the a bay for £5, it reduces noise and interference from electrics. Also put the router and RJ11 cable slightly out of the way of electrical cables where possible. Open the main socket faceplate and remove the orange wire, basically keeping 2 blue 5 white/blue. Im not sure how the engineer lowered the DB as I thought this was the ditance from the exchange, and how could that be repaired?